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Juno Awards: Spectre of loss overshadows the wins

OTTAWA—Not to get all deep and depressing over a stupid awards show or anything, but the 2017 Juno Awards were nothing if not a constant reminder of life’s ultimate impermanence.

The big final tallies at the end of this year’s Juno weekend in Ottawa? Three awards to an album by a gentleman CanCon pop poet recently diagnosed with terminal cancer; two to the band that will lose its frontman — and inevitably call it quits for good whenever the Unthinkable Thing happens to that very same gentleman CanCon pop poet; and two more to Canada’s original gentleman CanCon pop poet, Leonard Cohen, who left us all for another plane of existence last November.

Feist says Leonard Cohen?s work reflected a ?rich inner life.? The musician performed a cover of Cohen?s 1967 song ?Hey, That?s No Way To Say Goodbye? at the Juno Awards Sunday.

So, to recap, three of the seven “major” awards handed out on Sunday night’s otherwise lighthearted and snappy CTV Juno Awards, hosted by Russell Peters and Bryan Adams and broadcast from the Canadian Tire Centre — or the Palladium or the Corel Centre or the Scotiabank Centre or whatever the hell they call that rink in the middle of nowhere in suburban Kanata these days — went to the dead, the dying or the dying-by-association, on top of the previous three (plus one) awarded to the same players the previous evening.

The late Leonard Cohen added an Album of the Year award for his effortlessly classy deathbed missive You Want it Darker to the Artist of the Year trophy he took home from beyond the grave on Saturday night during the pre-broadcast Juno gala at Ottawa’s Shaw Centre. Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie, who revealed to Canada last May that he is facing off against untreatable brain cancer, added Songwriter of the Year — for the songs “The Stranger,” “The Only Place to Be” and “Son” from last year’s celebrated Secret Path solo LP — to the Adult Alternative Album of the Year and tangential Recording Package of the Year honours he earned on Saturday night. And the Tragically Hip themselves added Group of the Year to the Rock Album of the Year award 2016’s Man Machine Poem took the night before.

Alessia Cara wins the award for Pop Album of the Year at the Juno awards show on Sunday. (Sean Kilpatrick)

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At least there was light at the end of the tunnel. Twenty-year-old Brampton hitmaker Alessia Cara notched another victory for the nerdy girls by taking Pop Album of the Year for Know-It-All, while similarly youthful Edmonton ingénue Ruth B got the nod as Breakthrough Artist of the Year. Shawn Mendes, at age 18, proved himself better than Justin Bieber and Drake at mobilizing the online youth army that determines who gets to take home the Juno Fan Choice Award.

So Downie — who deservedly shared Secret Path’s Recording Package of the Year title with illustrator Jeff Lemire, designer Isis Essery and art director Jonathan Shedletzky, from whom the whole, stunning multimedia project is inseparable — was technically 2017’s big Juno winner. And, while no one connected actually mentioned him during the Saturday-night gala, he did show up on Sunday in a pre-recorded video “thank you” speech that made a lot of us kinda cry. And which, thanks to Secret Path’s efforts to call attention to the horrors of a Canadian residential-school system that left 15-year-old Chanie Wenjack freezing to death next to a rail line in northern Ontario in 1966, helped echo the opening moments of a Juno show that also saw Indigenous artists Buffy Sainte-Marie, A Tribe Called Red and Tanya Tagaq making sure all watching and listening understood that everything taking place in Ottawa this weekend was happening on “unceded Algonquin territory.”

“We’re not completely Canada yet. We have friends, countrymen and women who are in big trouble,” Downie said. “Our friends who were here before us for thousands of years, First Nations, have many, many stories like this . . . Help teach our young ones. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you tonight. Thank you for the time. This award is to all of us . . . to all of us bent on trying.”

Two of Downie’s fellow Hip-sters, guitarists Robbie Baker and Paul Langlois, were in the house on both Saturday and Sunday nights to accept their awards. On Saturday, they kept a mention of Downie out of their acceptance speech, but on Sunday when Langlois finally made it to acknowledging the obvious item hanging over the room — after diligently trying to acknowledge everyone who’d subsequently helped the Hip grow into the biggest band that Canada has ever seen over the 26 years since the band first stood on the Juno stage — the CTV broadcast’s overseers cued up the music to play him off for going on too long from the podium.

Presenter Tasha the Amazon looks on as Paul Langlois and Rob Baker accept the award for The Tragically Hip winning the award for Group of the Year at the Juno awards show Sunday April 2, 2017 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick (Sean Kilpatrick)

Feist performs Leonard Cohen's "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" in tribute to the late artist, who was honoured with Album of the Year for "You Want It Darker." (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

And when he refused to stop — “This is my arena,” he said — they tried to play him off again with the Hip’s own “Ahead By a Century” and then simply cut to commercials. Among the last words heard on national television: “I wanna give a shout-out to Gord Downie.” Fade out. FAIL. Major fail to all involved.

No worries, though. CTV also cut off Leonard Cohen’s son, Adam, when his own speech accepting his dad’s posthumous Artist of the Year trophy might have bettered the tribute he offered to his father off camera the night before on the broadcast.

He still got a good one off: “My father always said that he saw a Juno in my future. Of course, it was his.” But who knows what might have happened afterwards? Cut to commercial.

Toronto’s Leslie Feist, at least, did a pretty good job of honouring the late elder Cohen with her own version of “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” introduced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, themselves on the broadcast; it was, as predicted the night before by Adam Cohen himself — “irritatingly good.” He meant that nicely, by the way, and conceded backstage that he had tried very hard to get Feist herself to sing backup vocals on You Want it Darker.

Adam Cohen accepted the Album of the Year award on behalf of his late father, Leonard Cohen. (Justin Tang)

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“My thoughts are generally unchanged” on the matter of Feist’s “irritating goodness,” he said, calling her stripped-down tribute to Leonard Cohen “beautiful and touching and understated.”

The big loser? Drake. The superstar Toronto rapper was up for five awards this year and, once again, got blanked. His Views, the biggest album on the planet in 2016, lost Album of the Year to Cohen’s You Want it Darker, while “One Dance,” the biggest single on the planet in 2016, lost Single of the Year to the Strumbellas’ “Spirits.” Views lost even Rap Recording of the Year to Jazz Cartier’s Hotel Paranoia.

Yes, he was given the International Achievement Award, but that’s an utterly made-up creature incarnated years ago to honour people like Shania Twain, Adams and Céline Dion, and resurrected in 2017 so Drake could decline to pick it up at the Saturday pre-release gala. He will never, ever, ever set foot on Juno soil again.

The fact that the hugest pop star on the planet at this moment walked away once again empty-handed from the Canadian music industry’s annual moment of self-celebration was one of the factors that undercut whatever strides the Junos might have been taking cosmetically to address with Sunday’s opening number. At heart, this is clearly still an event presided over by the same jury voters who used to give Anne Murray album of the year every year, year in and year out, when those of us of a certain (middle) age were kids.

Recap: the 2017 Juno Awards

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